I See Your Face
by ariel2me
Summary: Three women, and their Baratheon husbands. (Argella Durrendon/Orys Baratheon, Cassana Estermont/Steffon Baratheon, Selyse Florent/Stannis Baratheon)


**Argella**

She hated him when he slew her father. But she hated him even more when he removed the chains her cowardly, traitorous men had brutally forced on her; when he covered her bruised, battered, naked flesh with his cloak; when he offered her wine, the only thing besides water that had passed her throat in days.

She hated her relief, her enforced meekness, her gratitude.

_Where is your pride, Argella?_ The Storm Queen who knelt to the Targaryen bastard. The whore who fucked and then married her father's slayer.

Her father had been full of pride. Argella wanted to live. She wanted her people to live. And she wanted Storm's End, the only home she had ever known.

She had knelt, true, and she had married him. But she had never offered herself to him.

She did what she had to do, to protect herself, and everything she held dear.

"You should be proud," he told her. "Your sigil, your House words, I'll not change that. They will be mine as well." _I did that for you_, was what he was implying.

_No, you did that for yourself_. For a bastard without his own House and his own words and his own sigil. She smiled and told him, "I am most grateful."

When he left to serve his dragon king, and they saw each other not more than once or twice a year, she was the happiest. It was the same for him, she knew.

There were children. There had to be; he was most insistent. He was starting a new House, a new dynasty, and he needed sons. A lot of them. "The Baratheons will rule over the stormlands for thousands of years to come," he announced, proud and confident.

When the dragon king finally drew his last breath, and the new king had no more need of Orys Baratheon in King's Landing, he came home for good to Storm's End. To Argella. They sat across the table from each other, staring but not seeing.

"Well," he said, finally.

_Indeed, _thought Argella_._

**Cassana**

She knew him only as her father's most fervent wish, at first. "My daughter, the wife of Steffon Baratheon, lord of Storm's End and grandson of a king." Laughter and sniggers that Lord Estermont was aiming too high, that the lord of the stormlands would most certainly choose a bride from a grander, richer House than the lowly Estermonts of Greenstone, had no effect on her father whatsoever.

"He will see you in all your glory, Cassana, and would not be able to resist," her father had insisted, time and time again. But it was a lie; he had no intention for Steffon Baratheon to see Cassana as she truly was.

_Too loud, too rude, too angry, too clever by half. Not meek enough, not courteous enough, not deferential enough_. Her faults were numerous, in her father's eyes. "Don't disappoint me, Cassana," he said, when what he truly meant was, _Don't be you_.

Who did Steffon Baratheon think he was marrying? The woman Cassana was, or the woman her father wanted her to be? She didn't know, and she never asked. And after the marriage, she was various women all at once. With her husband. With the people who called her '_my lady'_. Even with her sons, whom she loved fiercely and unconditionally.

Mask upon mask upon mask. "_But that is how you protect yourself_, _and how you protect the people you love_," she had told the son closest in temperament to hers. But Stannis refused to heed that lesson, stubborn and unyielding even as a boy.

She thought her husband was naïve, in many ways. With bright, sunny views of the future she could not - would not - share. _Someone_ had to be the one who feared the worst, who predicted danger in every corner. She saw that as her duty, in their marriage.

_I have loved him_. _Truly loved him_, she thought, astonished at that realization, when the waves battering Windproud finally yanked their hands apart.

**Selyse**

They deserved each other, she had heard it whispered. Stannis Baratheon and his cold, haughty wife. But unlike her husband, her coldness was a coldness taught, not one born and bred in the bones. She was once a girl who dreamed of beautiful weddings, of blushing brides and laughing grooms. She never confided those dreams to a soul; not her mother, not even cousin Delena, one of her very few friends. They would have laughed, she knew. Ugly Selyse, sticking out like a sore thumb even among the other not-so-beautiful Florents with their prominent ears. Strange Selyse, charmless and loveless.

_He would understand_, she thought, when she first met him. The man who looked nothing like his handsome older brother, the man completely lacking his brother's charms and gallantry. He would know what it felt like, to be disliked, overlooked, ignored, even hated, for nothing more than the sin of being who you are. She saw them as kindred spirits, almost. Together they would teach the world that they were not to be ignored, that they would not cower or hide away in shame, that they were forces to be reckoned with.

He _did_ understand, perhaps too well. He saw her and was reminded of himself and how the world had treated him, and despised her all the more for it. So she closed her eyes and she closed her heart and she taught herself not to care. Not to love.

_This is how you protect yourself_. She learned that lesson the hard way.


End file.
